This Everyday Immortality of Ours

Abstract

Let us leave for later the question that arises immediately as to the place occupied by the novel Doctor Zhivago, written decades ago but only now available to a wide readership, in the history of twentieth-century Russian literature. Let us first try to determine our own attitude to this book as readers and formulate the main feeling created by Boris Pasternak's prose. Is it capable of shaking us, the readers of today, with its references, utterly restrained by present standards, to the nightmarish excesses of history—the sudden "disappearances" of completely innocent people and the camps, prisons, and hard labor felling trees? Do we still have any strength left for horror at the blood that flows in the pages of Doctor Zhivago, beginning with the dispersal of the December 1905 demonstrations in Moscow and ending with the story of the crippled boy, Peten'ka, torn to pieces in the cellar by the brigand? of course, we do still have the strength, no matter how our experience as readers may be overly saturate...